NASA has signed a $330 million contract with the University of California to create a national research program linking NASA's Ames Research Center with scientists throughout the UC system to help the space agency fulfill its missions in fundamental and applied sciences.

The 10-year venture will be managed by UC Santa Cruz and is the first of its kind to directly link the space agency and the academic world.

That research will probe basic questions in many fields that are crucial to NASA's missions, such as astrobiology -- the quest to understand the origins of life and the possibility of life on other planets. It will also include such applied efforts as advancing the new field of nanotechnology by developing molecular machines and submicroscopic computer chips for ultra high- speed communications, computing and spacecraft instruments.

"NASA has research needs as far as the eye can see," said G. Scott Hubbard, director at Ames in Mountain View for the past year. "So many of those needs involve so much interdisciplinary research that increasing collaboration between our scientists and those of a great university seems like an ideal way of fulfilling those needs.

"Whether it's our need for new sensors for detecting life on Mars, or creating new software for high-speed computers to improving air traffic management, or conceiving future space missions, the new collaboration should prove invaluable."

Research fields in which UC scientists will be working along with NASA scientists include molecular biology, astrophysics, artificial intelligence, fundamental space biology, computer science, nanoelectronics and the engineering of complex systems, according to the NASA-UC agreement. All the research will be unclassified, Hubbard said.

He said his agency is establishing what it calls a "University Affiliated Research Center" with its headquarters at Ames, although much of the research the space agency seeks from its UC collaborators will be performed at laboratories on the university campuses.

Three percent of the new center's $330 million research budget will allow for "completely blue-sky work," Hubbard said: the kind of advanced thinking and undirected research that could ultimately lead to entirely new and unforeseen advances in both science and technology.

The new center itself -- "more a thing than a place," Hubbard said -- will also create a teaching institute to be run by San Jose State together with the Foothill and De Anza community college districts. The institute "will be a pilot for global change in science and engineering education," according to NASA, and will enable advanced students to work side-by-side with researchers at AMES and UC campuses.

For the past few years Ames has been developing a 213-acre research park designed to attract high-tech industries to unused areas of the Moffett federal airfield. But the new university affiliated research enterprise will be separate from it, Ames officials said.